A federal indictment was unsealed in San Diego, California, in July 2021. It says that a global organized crime ring is being run out of a government-run research university on the Chinese island province of Hainan.
It is not news that there is corruption in Hainan. It has thrived there for decades under Communist rule. One of the most infamous scams was run by a senior Communist Party official in Hainan who arranged “duty-free imports from Hong Kong of 90,000 Japanese-made cars and trucks at a cost of ¥4.5 billion (US$1.5 billion) and exported them—with the help of local naval units—to the mainland, making 150% in profits.”
But that is nothing compared to the worldwide criminal enterprise exposed in the recent federal indictment from the Southern District of California. Hainan University is home to a company known as Hainan Xiandun Technology Development Co. It has all the suspicious characteristics of a front company for organized crime:
“The company, whose name means ‘magic shield,’ was incorporated in 2011… Its registry address is the ground floor of the library on the campus of Hainan University, which is located in the provincial capital of Haikou. The company does not have a website,” reports the South China Morning Post.
Okay, no company offices, no website, no history of legitimate business activity, no legitimate street address. What legitimate corporation would have its mail and business correspondence sent to the ground-floor lobby of a campus library?
Maybe it is because Hainan University should be called Hacker University. It is not a private college or a school for organized crime, although it acts that way.
Officially, Hacker U is part of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, but it functions as an arm of the Ministry of State Security, China’s version of the CIA. Hacker U is just a cover for China’s spy school.
The Communist Party uses the university’s student population as a recruiting pool for cyber criminals. The four mysterious citizens who run the front company in the library lobby are actually intelligence officers. Their job is to teach Chinese kids how to steal the world blind through cyber theft.
Specifically, the kids were trained to “hack into the computer systems of dozens of companies, universities and government entities in the US and other countries between 2011 and 2018.”
You would not believe how many other governments have had their files infiltrated, how many corporate trade secrets have been stolen and how many billions of dollars have been extorted by computer thieves hired and trained by China. I asked for a copy of the indictment, which lists the thefts and cyber attacks in detail.
